Hot Nights with...the Italian: The Santangeli Marriage / The Italian’s Ruthless Marriage Command / Veretti's Dark Vengeance

‘Oh, no,’ Marisa denied hastily. She sighed. ‘Well, if—if you’re determined to stay, I’ll—get what you need. And a towel.’

‘Grazie mille,’ he acknowledged sardonically. ‘I hope you will not be so grudging with your hospitality when you are called upon to entertain our guests.’

‘Guests,’ she said grittily, ‘are usually invited. Also welcome.’

‘And you cannot imagine that a day might come when you would be glad to see me?’ he asked, apparently unfazed.

‘Frankly, no.’

‘Yet I can recall a time when your feelings for me were not quite so hostile.’

Pain twisted inside her as she remembered how hopelessly—helplessly—she’d once adored him, but she kept her voice icily level. ‘The foolishness of adolescence, signore.’ She shrugged. ‘Fortunately it didn’t last. Not once I realised what you really were.’

He said reflectively, ‘Perhaps we should halt there. I think I would prefer not to enquire into the precise nature of your discovery.’

‘Scared of the truth?’ Marisa lifted her chin in challenge.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘When it is the truth.’ He looked at her steadily, his mouth hard. ‘But I swore to myself on my mother’s memory that I would not lose my temper with you again, whatever the provocation.’ He paused significantly. ‘Yet there are limits to my tolerance, Maria Lisa. I advise you to observe them, and not push me too far.’

‘Why?’ She looked down at the floor, aware of a sudden constriction in her breathing. ‘What more can you possibly do to me?’

He said quietly, ‘I suggest you do not find out,’ and there was a note in his voice that sent a shiver the length of her spine. ‘Now, perhaps you will fetch me that blanket—per favore.’

She was halfway to her room when she realised he was right behind her.

She said, ‘You don’t have to follow me. I can manage.’

‘My travel bag is on your floor,’ he said tersely. ‘Also I wish to use the shower.’

‘You have an answer to everything, don’t you?’

He gave her an enigmatic glance. ‘Not to you, mia bella. That is one of the few certainties in our situation,’ he added, bending to retrieve the elegant black leather holdall standing just inside her bedroom door.

And he walked away before she could commit the fatal error of asking what the others might be.

Not that she would have done, of course, Marisa told herself as she extracted a dark red woollen blanket and a towel from the storage drawers under her bed, and took a pillow from a shelf in the fitted wardrobes. She would not give him the satisfaction, she thought, angry to discover that she was trembling inside, and still breathless from their encounter.

But then she was still suffering from shock at having come back and found him there, waiting for her. Waiting, moreover, to stake a claim that she had thought—hoped—had been tacitly forgotten.

She’d actually allowed herself to believe that she was free. To imagine that the respite she’d been offered had become a permanent separation and that, apart from a few legal formalities, their so-called marriage was over.

But she’d just been fooling herself, she thought wretchedly. It was never going to be that easy.

Because as she now realised, too late, they’d never been apart at all in any real sense. Had been, in fact, linked all the time by a kind of invisible rope. And it had only taken one brief, determined tug on Renzo’s part to draw her inexorably—inevitably—back to him, to keep the promises she’d made one late August day in a crowded sunlit church.

And of course, to repay some small part of that enormous, suffocating debt to him and his family in the only currency available to her.

She shivered swiftly and uncontrollably.

She could, she supposed, refuse to go back to Italy with him. He was, after all, hardly likely to kidnap her. But even if they remained apart there was no guarantee that the marriage could ever be brought to a legal end. He had made it quite clear that she was his wife, and would continue to be so, and he had the money and the lawyers to enforce his will in this respect, to keep her tied to him with no prospect of release.

The alternative was to take Julia’s unsavoury advice. To accede somehow to the resumption of Renzo’s physical requirements of her and give him the son he needed. That accomplished, their relationship would presumably exist in name only, and she could then create a whole new life for herself, perhaps. Even find some form of happiness.

She carried the bedding down the hall to the living room, then stopped abruptly on the threshold, her startled gaze absorbing the totally unwelcome sight of Renzo, his shirt discarded, displaying altogether too much bronze skin as he casually unbuckled the belt of his pants.

She said glacially, ‘I’d prefer you to change in the bathroom.’

‘And I would prefer you to accustom yourself to the reality of having a husband, mia bella,’ he retorted, with equal coolness. He looked her up and down slowly, his eyes lingering deliberately on the fastening of her skirt. ‘Now, if you were to undress in front of me I should have no objection,’ he added mockingly.

‘Hell,’ Marisa said, ‘will freeze over first.’ She put the armful of bedding down on the carpet and walked away without hurrying.

Yet once in the sanctuary of her bedroom she found herself leaning back against its panels, gasping for breath as if she’d just run a mile in record time.

Oh, why—why—did the lock on this damned door have no key? she wondered wildly. Something that would make her feel safe.

Except that would be a total self-delusion, and she knew it. Because there was no lock, bolt or chain yet invented that would keep Renzo Santangeli at bay if ever he decided that he wanted her.

Instead, she had to face the fact that it was only his indifference that would guarantee her privacy tonight.

A reflection that, to her own bewilderment, gave her no satisfaction at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE sofa, Renzo thought bleakly, was not at all as comfortable as he’d claimed.

But even if it had been as soft as a featherbed, and long enough to accommodate his tall frame without difficulty, he would still have found sleep no easier to come by.

Arms folded behind his head, he lay staring up at the faint white sheen of the ceiling, his mind jagged and restless.

He was enough of a realist to have accepted that he wouldn’t find a subdued, compliant bride awaiting him in London, but neither had he anticipated quite such a level of intransigence. Had hoped, in fact, that allowing her this time away from him might have brought about a faint softening of her attitude. A basis for negotiation, at least.

But how wrong was it possible to be? he asked himself wryly. It seemed she had no wish either to forgive him—or forget—so any plans he’d been formulating for a fresh start between them were back in the melting pot.

The simplest solution to his problems, of course, would be to settle for the so-called annulment she had offered and walk away. Accept that their marriage had never had a chance of success.

Indeed, the days leading up to the wedding had been almost surreal, with Marisa, like a ghost, disappearing at his approach, and when forced to remain in his presence speaking only when spoken to.

Except once. When for one brief moment at that dinner party he’d discovered her looking at him with a speculation in her eyes there had been no mistaking. And for that moment his heart had lifted in frank jubilation.

He remembered how he hadn’t been able to wait for their dinner guests to leave in order to seek her out and invite her to go for a stroll with him in the moonlit privacy of the gardens, telling himself that maybe he was being given a belated opportunity for a little delicate wooing of his reluctant bride, and that, if so, he would take full advantage of it.

But once all the goodnights had been said, and he’d gone to find her, she had retreated to the sanctuary of her room and the chance had gone—especially as he’d had to return to Rome early the following morning.

But he hadn’t been able to forget that just for an instant she had lowered her guard. That she had seen him—reacted to him as a man. And that when he’d kissed her hand she’d blushed helplessly.

Which suggested that, if there’d been one chink in her armour, surely he might somehow find another …

So, he was not yet ready to admit defeat, he told himself grimly. He would somehow persuade her to agree to erase the past and accept him as her husband. A resolve that had been hardened by his unwanted interview with his grandmother that very morning.